gentle angel • kousano

IV. water down what i call being grateful

It had been some weeks since the incident of the injured girl in her apartment, and when she went to her friends to confide to them about the whole predicament, they, instead of comforting her and telling her that they were glad that she was alive, called her "a goddamn fucking dumbass."

"Now, who in their right mind picks up a homeless girl from the streets of Yoko-fucking-hama and brings her into their home with no plan," Tachihara exclaimed.

"Hear me out," Kouyou tried, exasperated, "the poor thing looked like she was damn near starving, freezing, and bleeding to death! What did you want me to do? Leave her there?"

Tachihara nodded aggressively while Gin shrugged. Higuchi, on the other hand, gaped and blinked at her rapidly.

"You should have called the cops!" She exclaimed.

Kouyou blinked at that, surprised that she had never even considered the notion before or after the event.

"Huh," Kouyou responded dumbly.

Tachihara stared at her in awe. "Huh? Huh is all you've got to say?"

He stood up dramatically and stomped his foot, "My friend is a crazy person," he exclaimed loudly.

People in the shop looked up at the outburst a little alarmed, and Higuchi pulled him down and back into his seat by his jacket sleeve while she shushed him with wide eyes.

"Come on, Gin," Tachihara joked and held out his hand to the girl in an exaggerated gentlemanly manner, shaking his sleeve from out of Higuchi's grasp, "we're leaving."

Gin slapped his hand away lightly, though her bright smile was obvious under her mask.

And when she had called her half-brother, Chuuya, about it, he had said basically the same, though, if possible, with more profanity, scolding, and worry threaded in.

Now, life was back to normal. Kouyou only thought about the girl briefly, in passing, sometimes wondering how she was, why she was so afraid. To an extent, Kouyou could understand the notion of being scared in that situation as such, but the girl was obviously more than just scared. She was beyond reasoning. The girl didn't hesitate to knock Kouyou out with the baseball bat and didn't hesitate to hold a knife to her throat and threaten her life.

The girl didn't look powerful or confident when she was on Kouyou's lap and pointing a knife directly at her neck—she looked small. The clothes she had put the girl in swallowed her up, and she never felt the girl's body stop shaking throughout the entirety of the interaction. The girl didn't look as if she wasn't willing to kill Kouyou in a heartbeat, but she looked as if she was afraid that she would actually have to do it.

She had this hope in her eyes when she asked Kouyou to explain like she desperately wanted her to come up with a good enough lie so she wouldn't have to drive the knife through her neck.

Maybe she was overthinking the whole interaction, but the girl had that sadistic look in her brightly colored yet shockingly dull eyes—like she had killed before and just didn't want to do it again.

Kouyou had been right earlier when she had thought that the soft, childish look in the girl's eyes when she first found her was unnatural on her face because the hardness of her eyes when she threatened Kouyou looked like they really belonged to her. Previously, the eyes looked to be stolen. Like the mysterious girl had found someone innocent and lovely, unexposed to the horrors of what lie beneath the surface of Yokohama, and ripped their eyes out to put them in her own sockets.

Kouyou's imagination with this girl was definitely taking its liberties—maybe it was the boredom of the cafe at the moment, customerless, and had been for the past half hour, or maybe it was a little bit of trauma she had gained from the experience.